I personally like both Lt. Gov. Jay Collins and former Speaker Paul Renner. They are both highly capable of serving the state of Florida as our 47th governor.
Unfortunately for them, neither will have the opportunity.
Quite simply, anyone not named Byron Donalds, who I also like, has a math problem.
Collins’ pollster recently admitted his campaign faces a steep uphill climb. With four candidates receiving noticeable support, Donalds is comfortably sitting in the mid-to-high 40s. A popular theory among underdog campaigns is that undecided voters will break heavily toward Collins as Lieutenant Governor—perhaps 40% to Collins, 30% to Donalds, and 30% split among the rest.
My grade-school algebra teacher always suggested asking one question of any equation: “Is this possible and probable?" Yes, this scenario is possible but it isn’t probable.
Even if this improbable scenario came to fruition, Collins’ own polling suggests the outcome would still be a 16-point victory by Donalds (46% to 30%). Overcoming that gap would require an unprecedented Donalds implosion, including President Trump rescinding his endorsement. That scenario clearly isn’t going to happen.
Now, let’s look at the reality of the math.
Scenario 1: The Underdogs’ Best-Case for Contenders (A Mathematical Fantasy)
The pool of GOP voters is 5.56 million. Some have predicted turnout as low as 25-30 percent (in fact, the highest statewide turnout has been 28 percent in a primary in 2020 (we all know that COVID caused a bump in turnout, but 2018 turnout was 27 percent), but let’s assume a massive 55% turnout to give the contenders the most hope possible.
That gives us a pool of 3 million voters.
As of Sunday morning—nine days from the August 18 election—about 370,000 GOP voters have already cast a ballot.
Note: It is possible that mail, early, and Election Day voters could be motivated by different issues, but most credible polling takes that into account. For the pure mathematical outcomes outlined here, those differences are largely irrelevant.
Just to give each contender the absolute maximum benefit of the doubt, we will use the highest individual polling available for the challengers (even if released by their own campaigns) and the lowest recent polling for Donalds:
Fishback: 26.7%
Collins: 20.2%
Renner: 14.0%
Donalds: 42.0%
If we apply these best-case numbers to the 12.3% of the electorate that has already voted, here is where the race stands today:
Candidate Estimated Early Votes (Best-Case for each contender)
Donalds 155,400
Fishback 98,790
Collins 74,740
Renner 51,800
With roughly 2.63 million votes outstanding, Fishback (the strongest challenger in this hypothetical) would need to gain about 60,000 votes just to catch up. To win the race by a mere 1,000 votes, Fishback would have to capture 39.25% of the remaining outstanding electorate, while Donalds would have to plummet to 36.9%.
No credible poll has any challenger at 26.7% or above, nor does any credible poll have Donalds below 39%. The trajectory of this race simply hasn’t changed to make this possible.
Scenario 2: A Dose of Reality/Well almost — In this scenario, turnout is a historic high for a primary – 38 percent (not going to happen but continue playing along)
The statewide election officials I’ve spoken to expect turnout is going to be much closer to the historical average of 25-30%, which means about 1.5-2 million voters will cast ballots—not 3 million. For the sake of math, I’m going to assume a second scenario of a huge turnout of 38 percent, again to give contenders the largest pool of possible voters possible to overcome the lead Donalds had when people voted by mail and early.
If we look at the RealClearPolitics (RCP) polling average, which is much closer to reality, we find:
Donalds: 48.7%
Collins: 11.2%
Fishback: 8.8%
Renner: 3.8%
If we apply this reality to the 370,000 early votes, Collins has roughly 41,440 votes to Donalds’ 177,600.
With a smaller turnout of 2.25 million voters (38 percent turnout), there are only about 1.89 million votes outstanding. Once Renner and Fishback take their small shares based on the averages, Donalds and Collins are left battling for about 1.65 million votes.
A quick note on undecideds: While conventional wisdom suggests late-deciding voters tend to break toward challengers rather than the frontrunner—which matters in a tight, head-to-head race—there is enough chaos in a four-person field that it won’t make a major difference here. For the sake of this exercise, I divvied the undecided votes strictly between the top two candidates. We could run another scenario where we split the undecideds among all three major challengers, but the math still leads to an overwhelming Donalds victory, so there’s no need to bore you with the extra arithmetic.
In this scenario, Collins is already down by 136,160 votes, which means flipping the script requires a massive shift in the remaining outstanding ballots.
Unless something incredible happened while I was writing this, there isn’t a scenario where Collins gained 30 points overnight while Donalds dropped eight.
The Reality of 27% Turnout
Florida’s highest primary voter turnout was 28 percent in 2020 with a close 27 percent in 2018’s open gubernatorial race.
The following is the realistic scenario each candidate must navigate to win the GOP nomination.
At 27% turnout, the total pool of voters shrinks to roughly 1.5 million. With 370,000 early ballots already cast, that leaves a drastically smaller pool of just 1.13 million outstanding votes left on the board.
When the pool of available votes shrinks, the percentage of the remaining vote a challenger must capture to overcome their early-voting deficit skyrockets.
Assuming minor candidates continue to pull their baseline RCP polling averages, here is the exact percentage of the remaining 1.13 million votes each challenger would need to win just to tie Byron Donalds.
(Spoiler alert: With the remaining vote divided four ways, hitting the high-40s, in an incredibly perfect scenario, would still be virtually impossible).
The Head-to-Head Votes Needed to Tie and percentage of overall votes likely to still be cast:
Jay Collins 562,415 49.7%
Byron Donalds 426,255 37.7%
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James Fishback 553,280 48.9%
Byron Donalds 408,241 36.1%
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Paul Renner 534,250 47.2%
Byron Donalds 370,711 32.8%
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Note: The matchup percentages do not add up to 100% because the remaining share of the outstanding vote is taken by the other challengers on the ballot.
As the math proves once again: when the voter pool shrinks, the mountain for the challengers only gets steeper while the fall for Donalds becomes greater.
Neither of these are happening.
The Verdict
Donalds is overwhelming television with a Trump endorsement in a state the former President won three times. With that endorsement and the aura of an inevitable victory for Donalds, more undecideds will break toward the frontrunner than conventional wisdom would normally predict.
Meanwhile, James Fishback has imploded following a hail-Mary press conference where he made false accusations of criminal behavior against another candidate. It turned into a sack-fumble-turnover executed so poorly that his future in Florida politics is likely over. Neither Collins nor Renner has been able to cut through the noise to gain credible traction or improve turnout higher than historical averages to get the pool of voters large enough to have a credible chance of making a credible challenge much less have a chance of winning.
I don’t bet on Kalshi, but if I did, I would expect the final results to look something like this:
Donalds: 56%
Collins: 18%
Renner: 15%
Fishback: 8%
Others: 3%
Quite frankly, this race was over the minute Collins’ polling came out trying to turn it into a two-man race by suggesting Collins would lose by 16 points, so my prediction above is a little conservative even though it is so hard to exceed 50-55 percent in a 4-way race; but the way this race is breaking, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Donalds exceed 60%.
Regardless of the noise created by other campaigns during the next nine days, or the final percentage of each candidate, Byron Donalds will be the Republican nominee to become Florida’s 47th governor.
It’s all in the math.
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